Why Bush Needs to Spin the War

"Don't worry. You'll be safe. We know how to take care of terrorists here."

So said the chuckling immigration officer at Port of Spain the other day. I had been dispatched to Trinidad by the U.S. State Department to conduct a two-day seminar on investigative reporting for local journalists (your tax dollars at work!), and the first Trini I encountered could not resist needling the Americans.

The next day, amid talk of the Freedom of Information Act, finding sources, and Internet-assisted-reporting, one of the fifteen island journalists asked me and my colleague, Bonnie Goldstein, a former investigative producer for ABC News, what we thought of the U.S. media's coverage of the September 11 attacks. Before we could respond, several participants volunteered their opinions.

"The first day was fine, then it was too much, too much."

"Hysterical."

"It was, 'oh, poor, poor us.'"

"Like the United States was the only country ever to be hit by terrorism."

"Self-pity, plenty of self-pity."

A consensus formed: a self-indulgent America was excessively obsessed with its own suffering.

And this was coming from our friends -- reporters who live in a city overflowing with KFC restaurants and who had, on their own accord, come to the information office of the U.S. embassy desperately seeking pointers from American journalists. They were not insensitive to the horror of September 11, but neither were they overly sympathetic to America's pain and fear or deferential to U.S. concerns.

This exchange might have served as a focus group for the White House, as Bush presses his (latest) new initiative to sell overseas the war against terrorism. After a month of bombing, the Administration seemed to conclude it was, as the media cliche went, "losing the PR battle." The Bush White House was not admitting this in public. But others were saying so. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told a newspaper he saw "danger signs" the West was falling behind in this part of the struggle. Various commentators issued similar warnings. The war-worriers cried that Bush was not only losing ground in the Muslim world but that he also was slipping in Europe.

Bush's actions showed he agreed. In speeches he started comparing the Taliban and al Qaeda -- the "evildoers" -- to the "fascist totalitarians" of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. The goal was, as several White House reporters put it, to "demonize" Osama bin Laden. Bush opened rapid-response centers in Washington, London and Pakistan to counter Taliban reports. He sent Karl Rove, his chief political strategist, to Hollywood to take a meeting with studio execs and discuss what the flix-folks can do to bolster America's wartime image. And he hired Charlotte Beers, an advertising honcho once dubbed the Queen of Madison Avenue, to pull together a message operation to pitch the war -- partly via a television and advertising campaign to influence Islamic opinion.

Beers, famous within advertising circles for having handled the Uncle Ben's rice account, serves as undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. She told Andrea Mitchell, "I dislike that phrase selling because that's way too arrogant for where we are now. I think the best we can do is open a dialogue of mutual respect and understanding. I'd actually be very satisfied with that."

A dialogue? That's not a very high standard for an ad exec. In another interview, she noted, "What we haven't felt the need to communicate is what is the value system [of the United States] ... What are our beliefs? What do the words 'freedom' and 'tolerance' mean? We are having people who are not our friends define America in negative terms. It is time for us to reignite the understanding of America."

In other words, people elsewhere have America pegged wrong. And that is the fault of the foes of the United States. What does the Administration have in mind to turn this situation around? A Bombing for Tolerance campaign? Ads with Michael Jordan attesting to the goodness of America? (The slogan: "Be like us.") Will Bush intensify Operation Demonization and start referring to bin Laden as the anti-Christ? Movies that show Middle Eastern terrorists plotting mass murder against the decent civilians of the West? (That base has been covered.)